The incompatibility between the ethos of translation and the ethos of attestation

ESTEBAN LYTHGOE

Nueva York

Conferencia; SRS 2021 RICOEUR (ONLINE) CONFERENCE; 2021

The Society for Ricoeur Studies

This presentation aims to show the tension between the ethics of the translation and the ethics of the testimony. Our work will begin with the ethos of the translation. Already in 1984 Antoine Bergman had made clear the difference between the suppressed and auxiliary character of translation as technique (Berman, 14) and the ethical and metaphysical contribution of its fundamental principles. Between them, Berman emphasizes, especially, the opening to other: ?the essence of translation is to be an opening, a dialogue, the crossbreeding, a decentering. Translation is ?putting in touch with,? or it is nothing.? (Berman, 4). Having in mind that Ricoeur agreed with suits with Steiner?s statement that ?understanding is translation? (Ricoeur, 2004, 22), several interpreters, like Richard Kearney (Kearney, 152) and Paul Marinescu (Marinescu, 52) have characterized Ricoeur?s hermeneutics as a sort of philosophy of the translation.To discuss this statement, we will propose a phenomenology of translation comparing Ricoeur position on the issue in the decades of seventy and eighty, centered on language, and that of the nineties y two thousand more worried about its ethos. This phenomenology is based on these three questions: Who translates? What is it translated? How is it translated? With this analysis, we find an incompatibility between both periods in the second question. In the decade of eighty, Ricoeur had broken with the traditional empathic hermeneutics. Owing to concepts as ?distanciation by writing? and ?the structural objectification of the text?, Ricoeur showed that what is understood by reading is neither its author nor his intentions, but ?the world of the text.? However, On the translation seems to have left this distantiation by Ricoeur?s concept of linguistic hospitality, bringing the author to the reader and the reader to the author (Ricoeur, 2004, 42). Attestation can articulate both moments of Ricoeur?s work: the translator intends to transmit the original sense the author wanted to, with the permanent threat that the temporal distance and his personal perspective will affect his intention. Putting together translation and attestation, one can see a tension between the ethos that leads each of them: credence ? suspicion on the side of the attestation, against faithfulness ? betrayal on the side of translation. We will finish returning and discussing the political model of hospitality, the one which is central in the project of ?Reflections on a new ethos for Europe.? Although in this conference it does not include the word ?betrayal,? constitutes this model. Therefore, we believe contradicts the target to which Ricoeur was aspiring with this project and has to be left aside: to end with the cruel history of Europe, which it includes ?wars of religions, wars of conquests, wars of extermination, subjugation of ethnic minorities, expulsion or reduction to slavery of religious minorities; the litany is without end? (Ricoeur, 1995, 9).